AI made it easier to produce code-shaped output. Good contribution still means making your work easy to understand, review, and trust. You can now produce a pull request in the time it takes to make a coffee. Often less. This depends on the coffee, obviously. If you grind the beans, heat the water properly, and have opinions about extraction, the pull request may win by a comfortable margin. That should make us pause. Fast tools are useful. A coding assistant can help you read unfamiliar code, sketch an approach, write a test, or spot an edge case you would have missed. There is no virtue in doing everything the slow way just because it gives the work a faint smell of candle wax and suffering. The problem starts when the diff becomes almost free. A pull request has never been only a diff. It asks someone else to spend attention, apply judgment, take responsibility, and decide whether this change belongs in a project other people depend on. That cost still lands on a human.…